A New Diaspora by Sarah Elgatian

A New Diaspora

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Annig had a face like a knotted tree. You could hear dust on her tongue when she spoke and she spoke like a crow—flat and shrill and always half yelling. Her life was built like a folk tale with poverty, war, running for her life, refugees, exotic islands, and a mail-order marriage to a man she didn’t know. She held a country between her shoulders and ten children in her womb. A life of survival taught her mind-over-matter in all things. Her morning sickness she treated by playing cards. Her hunger she treated by turning rocks into dice.
    I remember her in her small kitchen shaped like a crooked L. She had three chairs at a lopsided square table covered by a clear plastic sheet and a pile of junk mail. One chair was in a corner blocked off by a counter, another was in the way of the walking space when in use. The third chair nearly touched the front door when pulled out and a yellow rotary phone hung on the wall above the padded teal chair. This is where Annig sat and shuffled cards and drank tiny cups of thick coffee. Over the table was a small, plastic covered window with a sun-bleached curtain hanging over it depicting happy orange mushrooms in a line.
    Annig (Ah. Neegk.) was as survivor, born during a genocide, learned to read and write at a refugee camp in Syria, and came of age in Batista’s Cuba. She had browned olive skin, thick coarse black hair, and an undisguisable accent. I knew her seated in that chair by the door with a demi-tasse cup tilted toward her and a stack of frayed red-backed playing cards in front of her.
    Annig was my grandmother. I don’t want to deny her when people look at me. I know that I have her eyes and her nose and her skin and her cheeks. I know how she survived. Her children were embarrassed by their dark skin and their poverty and their parents’ thick accents. They changed the way they pronounced their last name. They called themselves Eastern European. They learned to eat canned vegetables and soda. They married blond haired and blue eyed without exception, it’s uncanny, they must have known that whiteness was the best thing they could give to their children.
    Only one of my cousins could speak to my grandma and she was born colored like her dad—blonde and blue. Her skin is darker than his but I wonder: does she feel like I do? Growing up in Iowa the only people who looked like my grandparents were related to me. No one else had dark skin, coarse, wavy black hair, or a nose like a bird of prey. My dad let people assign his ethnicity to him. At the Family Restaurant he was Greek, at the pizza place he was Italian. There was one Lebanese woman, whose husband was white and worked at John Deere, who likely still believes my family is from Lebanon. My dad shared his office with a Mexican woman for two years who sometimes spoke Spanish to him.
    I don’t want to do that. I want to own my Grandmother’s squiggly alphabet and quit tweezing my face. I want to tell my uncle who fears Syrian refugees that those same Syrians gave his parents refuge. I want to see the mountain prominently displayed in every Armenian’s house, and call it my own.

The first time I saw Armenia on a map the news anchor was talking about war. Terrorism. Oil.
My whiteness may be the greatest gift my father ever gave me but it feels like a lie.
Dad said “part of the former Soviet Union.” He said “Mediterranean.”
He gets stopped at airports.

Do my cousins feel Middle Eastern? Do the people of Glendale and Fresno tell their neighbors that they’re white? Do their neighbors believe them? Are we all halfsies now so our off-whiteness or assimilation takes precedence over the accent you brought over on two boats carrying nothing but your younger brother?
    I can’t get it back. I can’t tell someone I’m like them and then ask them what it means. I feel her mountain, her cross, her 36 letter alphabet in my heart but I have no access to it. I can’t go back to her country with my light hair and pink cheeks and tell the natives there that I’m one of them.
    Do my cousins feel other? I’m afraid to ask. I don’t want to ask my anti-refugee uncle if he feels Middle Eastern. Maybe his Christianity will save him. Maybe his unpronounceable first name is an accessory. When people ask him where he got his name, what does he say?
    Where is our diaspora? Where do we, second generation, thirsting for connection to our grandparents and our stories, white-washed and assimilated and unable to make pilaf, where do we gather? Why, when asked where my name came from by someone who looks like my grandmother, do I say “my father’s family” and not “me?”
    I feel an emptiness in my stomach and block in my throat when I realize I will never know. I will have white children who will not know the resilience in their blood. I may look the most like her and I am the only one of her grandchildren who can see the story in the coffee but it gives me little solace. I take pride in coming from a people whose greatest tragedy was the killing of their teachers and doctors and artists but will they welcome me? I want to find a home in this culture of intellectuals, of women who cope with pain by playing cards or men who survive because they are mistaken for dead. I see this whole history of survival but I can’t touch it.

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Bio: Sarah Elgatian is a second generation Armenian-American with a lot of questions. She has a wife and a cat and beautiful family. Sarah likes bright colors, dark coffee, and wicked clowns. She believes in live music, wild animals, and homemade soup and lives in Iowa City, IA where she gets to experience all of these things every day.

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